Boris Berezovsky

Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (23 January 1946-23 March 2013) was a powerful Russian business oligarch who was best known for his opposition to Vladimir Putin's United Russia regime. In 2013, he was found dead in his mansion in the United Kingdom, with many news agencies speculating that his death may have been an assassination by the GRU.

Biography
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union on 23 January 1946, the son of a Jewish engineer and a Russian mother. Berezovsky graduated from the Moscow Forestry Engineering Institute in 1968 and worked for the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1969 to 1987, and he decided to make money off of Russian companies as they were privatized during perestroika. Berezovsky worked with a software development and car import/export business, and he founded the All-Russia Automobile Alliance in 1993. In 1994, he was nearly killed in a car bombing by the powerful AvtoVAZ automobile company, but he continued to prosper, buying ORT Television (Channel One) in December 1994 as Soviet Channel 1 lost popularity. Channel One would become the main television channel of the new Russia, and he made billions from investing in several other privatized companies.

Opposition to Putin
By 1997, Berezovsky had a personal wealth of $3,000,000,000, and he became deputy secretary of Russia's security council under President Boris Yeltsin, having been included in his inner circle after befriending his daughter Tatyana Yumasheva. Berezovsky helped in the formation of the Unity Party of Russia in 1999, but he became an enemy of Vladimir Putin due to Putin's status as a corrupt official. Berezovsky would move to the United Kingdom after Putin's election in 2000, and many of his companies were taken over by the Russian government. Berezovsky later failed in his 2012 lawsuit of fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, having claimed that he was a co-owner of Sibneft with Abramovich, while he had actually facilitated Abramovich's seizure of the company without having an ownership role. By early 2013, Berezovsky was known to have depression, and he told a reporter that he had nothing to live for. On 23 March 2013, he was found hanged in the bathroom of his Sunninghill, Berkshire mansion, and some were quick to blame the Russian government. Others, including some relatives, believed that he had killed himself.